Almost 600 tweets are sent every second through the microblogging site,
according to its own metrics

Twitter, which was launched in 2007, has enjoyed rapid growth in recent months. In 2007, around 5,000 tweets were sent per day, with that increasing to 300,000 messages per day in 2008. The number of tweets sent last year grew by 1,400 per cent, to around 35 million per day, and that figure now stands at 50 million tweets sent per day.

"Tweets per day is just one number to think about," wrote Kevin Weil, a member of the Twitter analytics team, on the company blog. "Tweet deliveries are a much higher number, because once created, tweets must be delivered to multiple followers. Then there's search and so many other ways to measure and understand growth across the information network. We'll take time to share more information, so please stay tuned."

According to Sean Garrett, vice president of communications at Twitter, 20 per cent of tweets – or roughly 83 messages per second – contain a reference to a product or brand.

However, activity on Twitter is dwarfed by that on other social-networking and media-sharing sites. YouTube recently announced that it was serving a billion videos per day, meaning web users watch almost 20 times as many clips on the site each day as they send tweets.

And Facebook users spend around eight billion minutes on the site every day, with around a billion messages sent through Facebook's chat program on a daily basis.